[Web4lib] Fifteen years of filling your mailbox

[B.G. Sloan]

Heck, has it been 15 years already? Back then my oldest kid was 15. Now I have two grandkids!

Bernie Sloan

> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org
> [mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org]
> On Behalf Of Roy Tennant
> Sent: Wednesday, May 27, 2009 10:48 AM
> To: web4lib at webjunction.org
> Subject: [Web4lib] Fifteen years of filling your mailbox
> 
> It suddenly occurred to me today that approximately two
> weeks ago Web4Lib
> passed its Fifteenth Anniversary. The list was started on
> May 12, 1994. I
> began it at UC Berkeley to help the Web team there plan for
> the UC Berkeley
> Library web site, which was to replace our Gopher-based
> Internet information
> system. It was modeled on, and inspired by, the Go4Lib list
> started by
> Andrea Duda at UC Santa Barbara.
> 
> It has been a sometimes wild and sometimes calm trip since
> then, with spikes
> of active debate over such topics as filtering. Some of us
> still have scars
> to prove it. These controversies also helped shape the
> management of the
> list. We began with few, if any, policies, and accreted
> them only when
> behavior on the list demanded it. I established an Advisory
> Board of trusted
> colleagues to help with questions of policy, and to prevent
> me from becoming
> even more of a tyrant than I already was. The members:
> Thomas Dowling, Karen
> Schneider, and Bernie Sloan have all served since the
> beginning of the
> Board, and have provided essential advice and support for
> many years.
> 
> List membership grew quickly in the early years, and seemed
> to plateau for a
> while at around 3,200 subscribers. Today we are at 4,746
> subscribers. For a
> while I was able to break down the membership by country or
> domain, which
> you can view at <http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/subscribers.html>.
> I
> haven¹t done it recently, but suffice it to say that we
> are not surprisingly
> dominated by subscribers from the U.S., Canada, and the
> English-speaking
> world, although our subscriber base hails from many
> countries the world
> over.
> 
> A number of years ago, and well before I joined OCLC, I
> migrated the list
> from the SunSITE server at Berkeley, which was on a slow
> decommission path,
> to the welcoming arms of WebJunction. This established a
> home for it that
> could continue without me or my place of employment
> continuing to commit to
> maintain it. 
> 
> It may seem like this is a self-serving message designed to
> solicit ³good
> job² replies, but that isn¹t my intent. I started the
> list because I
> personally wanted help, and that¹s exactly what I got.
> I¹ve had 15 years
> worth of other people solving my problems and giving me
> useful advice. If
> there is a balance somewhere keeping track, I¹d expect it
> to be sinking on
> the side of what I owe you all, not the other way around.
> Thanks for being
> here,
> Roy
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